The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1887-06-23
ABOUT DIRT R6Atjs.
The Evil and Remedy-The Economy OF
- Having Good Roads.
From the Nation.

The Evil and Remedy-The Economy Of
Having Good Roads.
From the Nation.
About this time of year Americans
begin to give an amount of attention to
roads and road.making which is sadly
wanting during the rest of it. There is
probably no people In the world which
has made such ptogtess in the arts Of
civilized life generally that seems to care
so little for What good many social
philosophers put among the very FORE
most of them, the art of road.making.
In fact, some philosophers have pro-
nounced the history of roads the history
of civilization. Nothing distinguishes a
civilized country from barbarous one
so markedly as the difference between
the means of communication between one
locality and another. As general rule,
one knows that people is rising in the
social scale by seeing its roads improve;
one knows that it is declining by seeing
its roads go out of repair. Nothing
marked so vividly the great plunge into
barbarism which Europe took after the
fall of the Roman empire as the disap'
pearance of the superb lines of commu'
nication which led from the forum
straight as an aftoH to every corner of
the Roman world. Nothing, too, tells the
tale of Chinese decadence so distinctly
as the ruin which has overtaken the great
roads aid canals Which at an earlier
period connected the capital with the
provinces. When an American gees to
Europe for the first time, nothing seems
odder than the superiority of the Europe.
an roads in countries which can make
no pretence of equaling the United
States in Other marks of material pro.
gress. We are not a declining people;
on the contrary we are the most growing
people in the world. We are not among
the poor nations of the globe; on the
contrary we are probably the very richest.
We are not Indifferent to material i'm.
provement; on the contrary the most fire.
quent charge made against us is that we
give too much attention to it, and yet we
are worse off by far, in the matter Of
roads than any other highly civilized
community.
The original reason of the American
indifference about roads was probably the
rapidity with which the early settlers
scattered themselves in small commune
ties over wide areas. The fewer people
there are to the square mile of inhabited
territory, of course the costlier roads
become: and when population is very
much dispersed, as in frontier settlements,
people cease to think-o of good roads as a
luxury within their reach, and devote
themselves simply to the task of keeping
them passable. This tendency to neglect
the art of road-making would probably
have disappeared early in this century if
the railroads had not come in as the
great lines of communication, thrown the
post roads and military roads out of use,
and relegated all roads but railroads to
the condition of crossroads or byways.
The railroads not only did this, but they
dispersed the settlers over still wider
areas than ever, and thus made the pros.
pect of running a good highway past
every mans door seem hopeless. The
consequence has been that the early
colonial or frontier state of mind-in
which road was considered good enough
if it was simply practicable to wheeled
vehicles THAT is, II there were no holes
or rocks in it sufficiently formidable to
upset carriage), and anything better
than this an unattainable luxury has
almost settled into a national tradition.
One has only to go few miles out of
any of our large cities to fud the roads
in every direction being repaired in the
exact manner in which they were re.
paired by the struggling colonists between
1850 and 17OO-that is, nothing is at.
tempted beyond filling up the holes with
any material that is at hand, and afford
ing facilities for the water to run off.
The material that is at hand is, of course,
the mud or compost out Of the adjacent
ditch. This is shovelled up with the
utmost gravity and deposited all along
the center, filling up the cavities and
hiding from view the projecting rocks.
In districts in which gravel or strong clay
is obtained in this way, the result is often
satisfactory enough. But as a general
rule the contents of the ditch are simply
mud or decayed vegetable matter, fit
only for manure. Spread over the road
as plaster, it rapidly becomes dust and
is swept away by the wind, or else be-
comes mud and is washed back again
into the ditch, or down into the hollows,
in which in vet weather it forms kind
of quagmire, through which horses toll
wearily. The one advance we have made
in this curious process over the early
l.coionists is tho invention of the large
giron scoop or shovel, worked by oxen OF
horses, as substitute for the manual
labor of lie olden days. A foreigner,
seeing it at work for the first time, is
always disposed to believe that the road
is being prepared for crop of some
kind, and as matter of fact we have
ourselves seen many mile of country
road in which after the spring repairs,
potatoes or corn would have grown very
luxuriantly.
Of course there are signs of progress
out of this primitive condition in the
more densely settled districts on the
eastern coast and in the neghborhood o1
the larpe cities. The Park roads, with